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seemed to be jolted with high voltage current. The
blaster dropped from his fingers, and his knees buck-
led. Sagging to die floor, he clasped both sides of his
head, lips writhing back over his teeth in a rictus of
silent agony.
Kane and Brigid caught him, holding him up.
"Who's Olivia?" Brigid asked.
Kane shook his head, putting a finger to his lips.
The seizure passed and Grant panted, "Nice strat-
egy, Kane. You always know the right thing to say.
Now I do regret not shooting you."
Rubbing his tender midsection, Kane said ruefully
to Brigid, "On second thought, this might have been
easier the way you and I did it."
Chapter 21
Salvo pulled off his coal scuttle helmet and dabbed
at the perspiration on his broad forehead. "When the
tuck are they going to get air conditioners that really
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work in these steel coffins?"
Seated across from him, Kane forced a sympathetic
smile to his lips. "Ours is not to reason why."
Salvo frowned at him irritably. "What's that sup-
posed to mean?"
Kane almost told him it was a line from a very old
poem, then realized he would also have to tell him
where he'd read it-in a book called Heroic Ballads
he'd found in the Cerberus library. Few mass public
book burnings had been staged over the past century
and a half, but that was due in the main to having
fewer books to burn.
The jump seats in which they and thirty of the
Battle Class breed were strapped quivered as the
treads of the huge personnel carrier crushed rocks and
uprooted saplings.
The vehicle was known as an OGRE, but Kane
couldn't help but think of it as a war wag. However,
it made the one that Sky Dog and his people found
seem like a baby buggy in comparison.
The OGRE combined the best elements of an APC,
a ground assault vehicle and a battleship in its eighty-
foot length. The ten-inch-thick vanadium 8l1Ilor plate .I
protected the crew against chemical and light con-
ventional weapons. The multispigot mortar launcher
tubes possessed a range of four hundred yards, and
the angle and rate of fire were adjustable. Four turrets
contained six-barreled MG-I A-9 miniguns that fired
high velocity rounds at up to one hundred per second.
And then there was the Blitz or lightning cannons.
The weapons accelerated electrons to fantastic speeds
and spit them out as coherent beams. The tremendous
energy discharges broke down the molecules of the
very air and ignited sparks that resembled lightning
bolts. Anything they touched went up in flames.
Six closed-circuit television screens, three to a
side, were bolted on the bulkheads, displaying exte-
rior images transmitted by the video cameras placed
at strategic points on the hull. The people in the com-
partment could get a fairly close approximation of a
360-degree view of their surroundings.
Early that morning a big cargo plane, escorted by
a pair of fighter jets, had flown out of the Dulce air
base. It ferried Kane, Salvo and thirty of the so-called
Battle Class breed to a military base in the Dakotas.
Kane thought the title Battle Class a misnomer if
ever there was one. The troopers were slender of
build and so blank of expression they might have
been mistaken for mannequins dressed in soldier fin-
ery. The helmets made their paper-pale faces seem
ridiculously small and elfin. The big eyes beneath the
overhang of their headgear barely blinked, and their
small baby mouths did not so much as twitch. Their
long, artistic hands cradled their Sturmgewher auto-
rifles with a lightness of touch that was almost effem-
inate.
Grenades hung from their wide leather belts, and
the thick flak vests encasing their slight upper torsos
made them appear weirdly barrel-chested.
After a two-hour flight, the plane landed at the base
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in the South Dakota badlands. There they underwent
an annoyingly superficial briefing by First Flight Ser-
geant Whitcomb.
"We're not certain of the number of the opposi-
tion," Whitcomb told them. "Just that they're there
and more keep arriving. For the past couple of days
they've had a camp at the base of the monument. We
don't have a clear idea of their armament either, but
''I d judge this is the same bunch of scum who raided
the Bismarck depot."
"And they're probably the survivors of the Ca-
nadian border campaign, too," Salvo grated. "We
can expect some casualties."
Sergeant Whitcomb flicked his eyes toward the
quiet ranks of the Battle Class. "More where they
came from, right?"
Kane responded to the rhetorical query with a di-
rect one. "If this group has been here for a few days,
with more arriving, why haven't they defaced the
monument if that's their intent?"
Salvo gave him supercilious stare. "Come on,
Brother. Who can figure out what the subbreeds will
do or why they do it? If they had any sense, they
would have turned themselves in at the rehabilitation
camps a hundred years ago."
At noon, they all filed aboard the OGRE. As soon
as Kane spied it, he experienced an unsettling sen-
sation of deja vu. He knew he had done all of this
before, but the double tap-line of memories did not
provide a clear recollection.
He tried to make himself comfortable, but it was
almost impossible with the constant jouncing of the
deck underfoot and the hard metal chairs. Although
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